Saturday, 31 May 2014

The hacker group Anonymous is preparing a cyber-attack on corporate sponsors of the World Cup in Brazil to protest the lavish spending on the soccer games in a country struggling to provide basic services, said a hacker with knowledge of the plan on Friday.

"We have already conducted late-night tests to see which of the sites are more vulnerable," said the hacker who operates under the alias of Che Commodore. "We have a plan of attack."

"This time we are targeting the sponsors of the World Cup," he said in a Skype conversation from an undisclosed location in Brazil. Asked to name the potential targets he mentioned Adidas, Emirates airline [EMIRA.UL], the Coca-Cola Co and Budweiser, which is owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Reuters had no means of confirming Che Commodore's identity or his affiliation with Anonymous.

The sponsors did not immediately respond to requests to comment on the threat.

A DDoS or Distributed Denial-of-service is a low-cost attack aiming at taking a website offline by simultaneously requesting access from thousands of computers in order to jam the host server.

The threat of cyber-attacks is yet another headache for the organizers of the World Cup kicking off on June 12 in Brazil. The 32-nation soccer tournament has already been marred by embarrassing delays in the building of stadiums and widespread discontent in Brazil over the excessive cost of hosting the event in a country with deficient public services.

In what could be the biggest cyber-security breach since the U.S. National Security Agency allegedly spied on President Dilma Rousseff's personal communications, Anonymous this week posted 333 documents extracted from the Foreign Ministry's computing network.

They include a briefing of talks between Brazilian officials and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden during a visit to Brazil in May last year and a list of sport ministers that plan to attend the World Cup.

A hacker known as AnonManifest used a phishing attack to break into the Foreign Ministry's databases and eventually access its documentation system, Che Commodore told Reuters.

"Until yesterday afternoon the hacker still had access to the system," he said.

The Foreign Ministry closed down its email system after the attack and instructed its 3,000 email account holders to change their passwords. Federal police is investigating the breach.

A Foreign Ministry official told Reuters on Friday that only 55 email accounts were hacked and the only documents that were obtained where attached to emails and from the ministry's internal document archive.

"The problem has been resolved. Nothing important was leaked," said the official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

But Brazilian diplomats abroad were left without email communications with their headquarters for several days. One diplomat in a European capital told Reuters on Friday the email service was still down.

Thursday, 6 March 2014

Since its founding, Getty Images has charged for its photos. If a media company wanted to use a Getty photo, the company paid Getty for the rights to that photo. But the Seattle stock-photo agency noticed its photos increasingly appearing on social media and blogs that hadn’t paid for the rights—one result of images being easy to find in Google Image searches and on news sites.

So the Seattle-based stock-photo agency has decided to make a huge portion of its photos free. On Wednesday, the company unveiled the embed tool, which will allow users to include images on websites, such as non-commercial WordPress blogs. The eligible images also come with buttons for Tumblr and Twitter, where a link to the image can be shared. (The image itself doesn’t appear on Twitter, however.)

Monday, 24 February 2014

Plenty have been wondering what's next for WhatsApp after the popular messaging service was purchased by Facebook for $16 billion last week, and now we have the answer: voice calls. According to TechCrunch, WhatsApp announced during a Mobile World Congress event today that it would be adding voice services to iOS and Android during the second quarter of the year. The feature will reportedly head to Nokia devices and BlackBerrys sometime after that.

WhatsApp also provided an update on its active user count: it now has 465 million monthly active users and 330 million daily users, according to TechCrunch. That's 15 million more monthly users than Facebook detailed just last week when reporting the purchase. WhatsApp has already risen to an impressive popularity on basic messaging features alone, and the addition of voice calls should only enhance that further when they begin to roll out later this year. The app has done well by offering inexpensive messaging services where messaging is traditionally quite expensive, and doing the same for phone calls would likely be a boon for growth. WhatsApp is reportedly optimizing the amount of data its voice calls use, which should help in keeping users' expenses down as well.

The Guardian reports that WhatsApp's voice calling features will be free, though it's possible that this may only be for a limited time. Messaging is initially free within the app, but eventually requires a $0.99 per year subscription. It's likely that voice services will fall under this too, while breaking it out as a second offering could even provide an additional revenue stream. Though WhatsApp has never appeared eager to bother users with added costs like that on the path to big profits, it'll be interesting to see if that changes as a public company underneath Facebook.

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Sunday, 23 February 2014

If it wasn't clear to first-generation Galaxy Gear owners that they were beta testing a new product category for Samsung, it should be obvious now: the company has just announced not one but two follow-ups to its original smartwatch. Both the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo drop Samsung's Galaxy branding and follow the original Gear by a bare five months.

Neither watch's key specs differ all that much from the first Gear. Both of them have 1.63-inch 320×320 AMOLED displays, 4GB of internal storage, 512MB of RAM, Bluetooth 4.0, and an IR blaster, all identical to the first-generation watch. The biggest internal difference is probably a 1.0GHz dual-core SoC of unspecified make (one of Samsung's own Exynos chips seems like a good bet), an upgrade from the 800MHz single-core chip from the first Gear. The extra performance should help to smooth out some of the performance jitters we noticed in the first Gear. Despite the extra CPU core and a somewhat smaller 300mAh battery, Samsung claims that both Gear 2 watches will last two or three days between charges, roughly doubling the runtime of the original Gear.

Samsung has made even larger changes to the software, jettisoning the original Gear's customized Android 4.2.2 in favor of its own home-grown Tizen operating system. Tizen is a Linux-based mobile OS that rose from the ashes of the MeeGo project back in 2011, and counts Samsung and Intel among its major backers. Engadget notes that the Gear watches are two of the very first commercial products to run Tizen, after Samsung's NX300M camera.

Visually, the new software is similar to the old—Samsung's promotional shots all show light white text and images on a black background, saving power by keeping as few of the AMOLED panel's pixels active as possible. However, using Google's debug tools to hack around with the Gear will no longer be possible (not a huge loss, unless you enjoy minuscule games of Angry Birds and Candy Crush). We'll need to wait to get some hands-on time before we can talk any more about how the new software differs from the old. It's also unclear whether the Tizen watches mean that the old Android one will stop getting new updates and apps, or if Gear apps will be compatible with all three watches.

The differences between the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo are relatively small. Both include a new hardware Home button on the face, and both will be offered with replaceable wristbands in a variety of colors ("Charcoal Black, Gold Brown and Wild Orange" for the Gear 2 and "Charcoal Black, Mocha Grey and Wild Orange" for the Neo). The Gear 2's face is metal while the Gear 2 Neo's is plastic, making the Neo a little larger but a little lighter (37.9 x 58.8 x 10.0mm and 55g for the Neo compared to 36.9 x 58.4x 10.0 mm and 68g for the Gear 2). Finally, the Gear 2 will include a 2.0 MP camera integrated into the body of the watch, while the Gear 2 Neo includes no camera option. The original Gear used a strap-mounted camera that added extra bulk and made the strap impossible to replace.

Both the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo will be available worldwide in April for as-yet-undisclosed prices (expect the Neo to be the cheaper of the two options). Like the first Gear, the watches will only interface with compatible Galaxy phones and tablets and not products from other OEMs or software ecosystems. Thanks to the Android 4.3 and 4.4 updates Samsung has been distributing to its various devices over the last few months, that list should be much more expansive than it was when the original Gear launched.

Ars will be on the ground at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, and we should be able to spend some hands-on time with the new watches there.